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So for those who aren't aware, graph search was very powerful. You could find Graph Search to search for events, people, Pages on a variety of parameters using Natural Language Phrases For example:

People who work in <Company> and live in <Location> would show all people working in a certain company living in a certain location (provided these were updated in their profiles).

Similarly, Future events named <searchtag> happening in <location> would show you all events that were happening in your city. If you removed the <searchtag> it would simply show you all events

These features stopped working after the recent update and I can't figure out why. Now all it does is show search for the phrase withing posts. None of the useful stuff.

I have no idea what happened since I can only find news articles praising the update since it makes graph search work on mobile.

Also, changing language to English (US) doesn't work. I've already tried changing it to English (UK), spanish, german, hungarian and Klingon and then back to English US.

That's not the problem. And I'm not the only one facing this problem from the looks of it. https://www.facebook.com/graphsearcher

Read the comments on the wall.

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  • Very good question. I suspect a very small percentage of their users actually used the Graph Search (obviously no one in the media used it since no articles mentioned that it disappeared), and more people wanted to be able to search in posts instead. Perhaps they removed the graph search because it would have required too much computing power to determine if a search is supposed to be within a post or if it should be a graph search?
    – pacoverflow
    Dec 28, 2014 at 8:45

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This is partially true.

Facebook Graph Search is still available. It seems to not display for long queries and also for correct queries (fuzzy searches seem to be dropping) and favouring post searches instead.

People who work at Facebook (not People who work in Facebook)

Facebook Query

People who work at Facebook and live in Ireland

Facebook Query

Future events named Carnival

Facebook Query

Future events named Carnival happening in Brazil

Facebook Query

So it seems Facebook Full Text Search and Facebook Graph Query Search share the query depending on the data supplied.

The best thing to do will be to just play with the queries until Facebook provides a better UI.

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I have done a lot of Facebook Graph Search queries in the past, and I just discovered something interesting. Many of my previous Graph Search queries still work, but only if I click on them from my Activity Log (you can find all of the searches you have ever done there). If I try to re-type them into the search box, then they may not work.

As an example, a few months ago (prior to the recent search changes) I had searched for Photos of Kaley Cuoco Sweeting. This returned a seemingly unending list of photos. But if I type in Photos of Kaley Cuoco Sweeting into the search box now, it returns results within Posts, and there are no results on the People and Photos tabs. There's no way to get that seemingly unending list of photos by typing something into the search box now. But when I click on the link to my previous search in my Activity Log, then it works like it did a few months ago - it returns that seemingly unending list of photos.

So if you want to do a Graph Search, and it is one that you have done previously, then go to the Search section in your Activity Log and find the link to that search. Click on it and it may still work.

EDIT: It appears that many of the graph searches that didn't work for the past year are working now.

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  • yes i noticed that too. Unfortunately, for new queries it doesn't work. if someone could disect how the queries work since they basically convert it to a url, we might have a working solution
    – SoWhat
    Jan 13, 2015 at 12:16
  • @SomeshMukherjee Try doing those graph searches again. Facebook seems to have restored much (if not all) of the functionality.
    – pacoverflow
    Nov 20, 2015 at 1:18

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